Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot gives GamesIndustry International his outlook on free-to-play games as a way of combating PC piracy, explaining the difficulties presented by serving an audience they perceive to be 93-95% thieves:

"We want to develop the PC market quite a lot and F2P is really the way to do it," said the French CEO. "The advantage of F2P is that we can get revenue from countries where we couldn't previously - places where our products were played but not bought. Now with F2P we gain revenue, which helps brands last longer.

"It's a way to get closer to your customers, to make sure you have a revenue. On PC it's only around five to seven per cent of the players who pay for F2P, but normally on PC it's only about five to seven per cent who pay anyway, the rest is pirated. It's around a 93-95 per cent piracy rate, so it ends up at about the same percentage. The revenue we get from the people who play is more long term, so we can continue to bring content."

spacecadet wrote on Aug 22, 2012, 12:01:As someone who works in the gaming industry I have to say his numbers look about right. Once you start considering countries like China and Brazil the piracy rates shoot through the roof. The entire comment is about those countries, but everyone here takes it as an attack on western gamers, that is funny in so many ways.

Western gamers are directly affected so of course we weigh in, I'm not sure why that is funny.

It's not funny that we weigh in, it's funny that we think we're the entire world.

And while I get that we're not, we've very specific in our gaming. Sony has found that out now that Microsoft is dominating the US - Western gamers like a certain type of game. Chinese gamers like a different game.Anyone trying to cater to both will get burned very badly.

No what's funny is UBI expects the ENTIRE FUCKING WORLD to play by their rules. Gee I wonder where they got that idea from....